Carlie Simmons (Book 1): Until Morning Comes (4 page)

Carlie and Phillip moved side by side
down the hallway, stepping over three mangled Secret Service agents as well as
numerous college students, all of whom had bite marks on their necks but also
bullet wounds to the head. She could see the numerous spent magazines and shell
casings littering the floor.
This attack was swift and unpredictable.
These
things must have overrun the others before they could get away
. Carlie
knelt down beside the bodies to check if any of them were the president’s
daughter, then she moved down the hall in a low squat.

Phillip motioned down the hallway,
keeping his weapon fixed ahead. “A pile of spent shell casings by the last door
on the right,” he said.

“That’s room 48,” whispered Carlie, who
moved forward, positioning herself to the right of the door. She remained
hunched and moved up to the rectangular window on the lab door, noticing the blood
on the silver handle. Peering inside, she saw the room contained overturned
chairs, a shattered wooden table, and six more bullet-ridden corpses.

She nodded to Phillip as they prepared to
do a dynamic room entry, something that she had performed hundreds of times in
their bi-monthly training events. Carlie flung the door open and entered to her
right while Phillip inserted himself to the left.

“There in the corner,” he said,
motioning past a table to a cabinet. “The other agents are all down.”

“Shit,” Carlie said, moving up to look at
her fallen colleagues until she stood over the body of the last man. “Daniels
here must have killed the attackers before dying from his wounds.”

“But where the hell’s the girl?” Phillip
said, scanning the room. “She must be dead too. We should get out of here,
Carlie—before it’s too late.”

“We’re not going until we have located
Gemini. Get any extra mags off the bodies,” Carlie said.

Phillip was staring at the mangled
figure beneath him, his eyes unblinking.

“Phillip—did you hear me?”

“Copy that,” he stuttered.

“Remember your previous training and we
will get through this,” Carlie said, as if Gerald were right behind her saying
those same words to her. “Right now, we’ve got to locate the girl. The helo
will be here any time.”

As Carlie stood up, she heard movement
coming from behind a cabinet near the corner. They both rushed forward, sliding
the ceiling-high unit aside. Behind it was a large wall vent. Carlie knelt down
while lowering one of her weapons and removing a flashlight from her vest.

“Gemini, are you there?”

“Carlie—is that you? What’s happening?”
said a young woman’s voice from the dark confines of the ventilation shaft.

Carlie yanked the mesh screen off and
shone her light down the square galvanized shaft.

“There’ll be time to figure that out
later. Right now, we need to get you to the roof. There’s a helicopter on the
way.”

She extended her hand and saw slender,
tan fingers reach out for hers as a terrified woman emerged. Eliza’s black corkscrew
hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her lab coat bore red splotches.

“Eliza, are you OK—are you injured?”

“I think I’m alright,” she whispered
through trembling lips.

As Carlie looked the young woman over for
any signs of trauma, she saw the shadow of another figure emerging from the
ventilation shaft. An older man with a slender gray beard and bent wire-rimmed
glasses was struggling to climb out of the narrow passage.

Phillip had his weapon trained on the
figure as Eliza moved to help the man out. “It’s alright. This is Professor
Alan Beauchard. I’m his lab assistant and was working here with him when we
heard all the screaming outside.”

“Anyone else jammed in there we should
know about?” said Phillip.

“That’s it. We were the only ones to
make it. The other agents were all bitten but killed the attackers in the
hallway. After Daniels shoved us in the ventilation shaft we heard more gunfire
and then it was silent until you arrived. Where are the other agents now?”

Carlie stepped aside, letting Eliza see
the dead figures splayed on the floor behind her. “We’re it and we need to get
to the roof now.”

“Oh my God—how can they all be dead? Dear
Lord, this can’t be happening,” she said, clasping her hands over her mouth and
hunching over.

Carlie grabbed Eliza’s arm, yanking the
sobbing woman and pulling her towards the entrance.

“Move, before more of those things come
this way.”

Carlie tapped her ear-mic. “Alpha One,
this is Team Two, we are headed to the extraction point, over.” As they moved
past the bodies and over broken glass, she heard the pilot screaming in pain
and then static ensued. She repeated the call but got no reply.

She repeated the message two more times
but to no avail. “The helo must have been comprised. Time for Plan B.”

“What is Plan B, young lady?” said the
nervous professor, whose hands were shaking.

“Plan B is head to the roof and wait for
another airborne assault team, as going down below is not an option.”

As they entered the hallway, Carlie led
them back to the stairwell and slowly pushed open the heavy steel door. She covered
her mouth and nose with her sleeve in case any wisps of tear gas had floated up
from the lobby, but all she saw was the gray plume below cloaking the final
resting place of her friends. A subtle lilt of breeze in the lobby was swirling
grit and airborne glitter upward, and she could hear the sound of footsteps
coming from below. She motioned everyone to enter the stairwell and begin
moving up to the roof. As she did, she peered over the edge of the handrail and
could see a harried group of blood-soaked, infected humans, including two
former agents, leaping up the stairs towards them.

Carlie looked up at the door to the roof
and then back down the hallway to her right beside the open door. “This way;
we’re going to Plan C, D, and E until we are out of here.”

As they ran to the elevator, Carlie
yelled back to Phillip, “Secure the door with the fire hose on the opposite
wall. I have to pry open the elevator so we can climb down.”

“You got it,” he said, slinging his
weapons and smashing out the glass on the wall compartment. Then he unraveled
the thick canvas hose and pulled it across the floor, attaching it to the door
handle on the stairs with a series of half-hitches. By the time he was finished,
a dozen creatures were pawing at the narrow window and slamming their contorted
bodies against the thick metal.

Carlie stood in the middle of the
elevator and began prying the silver doors apart. “Get down here, both of you,
and help me. This is too heavy to do alone.”

Eliza and the professor lent their hands
until the doors were peeled back eighteen inches. “Phillip, can you find
something to jam in between the doors?” she shouted under heavy breathing.

He kicked open a door to a nearby office
and quickly returned with a metal chair. Once it was wedged inside, Carlie
removed her grip and pulled out her flashlight, aiming its beam into the shaft
below.

“We’re going down there—are you kidding
me?” said Eliza.

“Unless you want to stay here and be
ripped apart by those piranhas, you’re going to follow Phillip down the service
ladder. Once we’re all inside, I’ll release the door. That should buy us some
time.”

“What about you, Carlie?” said Eliza,
whose face was still pale.

“I’ll be right on your heels after I
slow these things down.”

They could hear the metal door of the
stairwell being yanked violently, followed by the sound of the small glass
window shattering. Raw, yellow hands pawed through the opening, attempting to scrabble
their way through.

“Down the ladder you all go,” snapped
Carlie as she ran forward to procure the remaining weapons off the dead agents
on the floor. She ran back to the elevator shaft while Phillip led the others
down the dark passage. Carlie laid three rifles from the fallen agents on the
ground and then readied her own MP-7s. She steadied the barrels on the
now-rickety stairwell door.

As the fire hose gave way from its wall
mount, the door broke away from its shattered hinges. Creatures began flooding
through the entrance. Carlie unleashed a volley of fire from both weapons,
spraying the mass with head and neck shots as best as the fully automatic weapons
allowed. Seven of them went down in the first volley but were quickly replaced
by a dozen more ravenous ghouls. Again, she fired repeatedly, dropping more
creatures until both weapons were dry, then grabbed the replacements off the
floor and continued the deafening spray of bullets, clenching her jaw with the
release of each hail of gunfire.

A shroud of gunsmoke roiled into the
corridor before her, eventually coalescing into a veil of red mist where the
bullets impacted the unending wave of attackers. The entrance and hallway grew
choked with bodies but more creatures struggled to climb over the mangled
carcasses. Carlie kept waiting for the carnage to end but the flood of
creatures didn’t diminish. She finished another surge of firepower and tossed the
smoking rifles down while grabbing the last MP-7.

Eight more creatures had entered the
hall, slipping on the wine-colored floor full of skull fragments, which gave
her a few critical moments to finish them off. The last one that collapsed at
her feet was a hulking brute with shovel-like hands. Like the others, its skin
was jaundiced and its cheeks were sagging rolls of flesh, like the ripples on a
beach.

With her MP-7 nearly depleted, and with
no end in sight of the monstrous horde, she slung the weapon and retreated back
to the elevator shaft. She lowered herself down, grabbing the cold metal rungs
with her trembling hands. She removed her pistol and used the butt to slam the
desk chair out of the way as the doors slid closed and darkness ensued. As she
descended she heard clawing and muffled shrieks at the elevator doors until the
sound grew faint with the approach of the lower floor.

Stepping off the ladder, she heard the fluty
voice of Phillip, who was standing in the shadow of his flashlight beside the
others. “What do we do now? Those things are just going to keep coming—they
won’t stop.”

“Yeah, I’m fine, thanks,” said Carlie, trying
to calm the tremors in her upper body.

Carlie aimed her flashlight into the
corner of the cramped space. “There’s a service door here that may lead to
another corridor.” She motioned to Eliza to help her open it and then she
climbed through the square enclosure.

“Looks like it’s navigable. It’s a straight
passage that goes on for at least 300 meters,” Carlie said, pulling her head
back inside. Carlie’s mind snapped back to the ghastly creatures she had
dispatched.
What’s happening in the world? The briefing earlier said the
attacks started last night back in the Southeast…and now…now this has swept
across the country. What could’ve caused this?

She blew a strand of hair off her nose
and leaned against the wall of cables while placing a fresh magazine in her
rifle. Carlie refocused her thoughts on the passage ahead. It was all that
mattered right now. As thoughts of an imminent rescue slipped away from her,
she gulped in a breath of musty air and pushed forward, leading the others
through the narrow corridor.

When nightfall came, Jared found the
streets of downtown Tucson to be relatively quiet if one could shut out the
distant gnawing of flesh a few hundred yards to his right, where four creatures
were feasting on a decapitated mailman. He studied them, noting their lemony
faces, which bore heavy wrinkles and reminded him of armadillos.

The street lights were flickering above,
illuminating the sidewalk outside the Crown-Vic where he had hidden for the
afternoon. The vehicle had been left running earlier when the marshal exited,
and the air-conditioning was still cooling the interior despite the slightly
ajar front door. Jared mulled over how much fuel was left and if he should try
to drive away from the scene of horror or try to duck into one of the nearby
university buildings three block away. The campus area seemed to have suffered
less destruction than the burnt-out shops and restaurants lining the downtown
corridor, and he could see a few lights on in the upper floors of some of the nearby
structures.

Most of the late afternoon in his
cramped hideout had been spent trying to silently open the car door and attempt
to search for the handcuff keys that he hoped were still attached to the shredded
corpse of the marshal outside. He had managed to locate the blood-encrusted
Glock in the man’s severed hand but the keys were not to be found. It had taken
hours just to extract the pistol, as he had to constantly halt his efforts and
duck out of sight beneath the tinted windows of the Crown-Vic whenever frantic
survivors ran past in their futile attempt to escape the growing crowds of
other-worldly attackers.

If I can just get those keys and my trusty
daypack out of the trunk, life will be relatively peachy,
he thought as
the faint odor of dried flesh from the pavement pierced his nostrils.
No way
I can stay here in this damaged rig, despite the nice leather seats.
He raised
his head slowly above the bars, looking past the dead marshal on the
passenger’s side and out at the four figures on the sidewalk by an overturned
ice-cream cart. Jared panned his head around the city block in search of other
survivors but only saw body parts, abandoned vehicles, and darkened buildings.
Again, he noted the campus structure two blocks away, which had a single light
on in the lobby.

Hmm…that place seems like my best bet
and may offer the hope of other survivors…strength in numbers and all that.
But I need a
distraction if I’m gonna have a chance of even making it there on foot.
He
looked around at the street ahead and back at the body of the marshal. Then he
mulled over his options and finally raised his eyebrows in wonder.

“Hell, yeah, Jared—you are a genius, a Confederate
Einstein,” he whispered, while a slight frown crept out from the corner of his
mouth. Jared looked down at his shaking hands with a look of surprise. He had
always been the cool-handed thief with unruffled nerves but now he was trembling
in fear like he was a newbie working his first heist.

Jared took a deep breath and tried to
drive away the horrific images on the street from his mind. He refocused on his
escape plan and ran through it like he was rehearsing for a house robbery,
visualizing his actions and contingencies. When he was confident of his scheme,
Jared raised his head and scanned the surrounding streets one more time. “If
all else fails, I’m gonna take a bunch of those cantaloupe heads with me,” he
whispered while palming the Glock.

He waited for the four nearby creatures
to delve into the carcass and then he took a deep breath and began moving.
Slowly opening the left rear door, he slid onto the entrail-encrusted pavement,
shuffling towards the deceased marshal, taking pains not to soil his Nikes by
stepping in any blood. Then he scanned along the nylon ballistic belt for any
signs of the handcuff keys, then padded the soiled pockets. He felt something
in the front pants pocket and reached inside and pulled out a pair of stainless-steel
keys, trying to suppress a slight grin.

Then he moved backwards to the driver’s
door and insinuated himself between the seat and the punctured air bag, trying
not to look at the bloated figure beside him. He removed a folding knife from
the pants pocket of the deceased marshal and flicked it open, then pierced the
edge of the airbag. The marshal collapsed into the door, his head thunking
against the tinted window. The engine was still idling and the vent blew a
stream of cold air across the man’s pale forehead and his unblinking eyes.

Jared stowed the blade and removed the marshal’s
pistol and spare magazines. Then he began working the miniscule key into the
left cuff while crouching low. With one side free, he inserted the key into the
right cuff, but it wouldn’t fit. He tried again but the key would only enter
part way. He grimaced and slowly tried manipulating the key, but something was
jammed in the tiny portal, preventing entry. “What the hell are these, some cheap
Asian imports?” he muttered as he switched to forcefully trying to make the key
fit. As he twisted it in place and started cursing, his right foot accidentally
thrust the ignition pedal down, causing the engine to rev.
Out of all the
times to have trouble getting out of handcuffs, it has to be today, really?

Jared froze and looked over the half-arc
of the steering wheel at the four creatures on the sidewalk, which were now
standing and sniffing the air. “Shit, looks like our getaway just got bumped
up, partner,” he said, sitting erect and glancing at the body next to him. He
stuffed the key in his shirt pocket and thrust the shifter in reverse with his
manacled hand. The creatures broke into a run, their shrieks piercing the inky
black street around him.

As he spun the Crown-Vic around, the
headlights shone on dozens of creatures slipping out from the confines of
alleys and storefronts. With the ghastly images filling the rearview mirror, he
slammed the gear into drive and raced forward along the littered street. He
careened against an abandoned bus and towards the university. The building's
light in the distance, which had served as his only talisman of hope, grew
brighter with each second.

More wrinkly-faced monsters began
pouring into the street behind him like a flash flood raging through a canyon. His
eyes grew wide as he saw hundreds of them sprinting behind the vehicle. He looked
over at the slumped figure of the marshal lolling against the door. “You
should’ve worn a seatbelt, bro, and you’d still be here to dish out justice,”
he said, leaning over and opening the door. “Glad you could help with my
getaway though, Sergeant Q-Tip.” He shoved the man out the door onto the street
and continued speeding away. In the mirror, he saw the tangle of creatures slow
as they descended upon the bloated body.

“A good payoff comes from stellar
planning. Such a great mind, all alone in so small a world,” he said with a grin,
looking at the shrinking images of his pursuers in the rearview mirror while
trying to ignore the fear thrashing at his insides. As he redirected his eyes
back to the dimly lit street ahead, the car ran over an upturned Harley Davidson,
causing Jared’s head to bounce into the padded ceiling, followed by a grinding
noise as the bike wedged itself under the front axle. He could see sparks
showering the pavement in every direction.

“Nice going, Ace,” he shouted as the
Crown-Vic sputtered along the street, coming to a halt beside a burger shop
half a block from campus. The car’s engine chortled and smoke rose from the
seams of the hood. Jared swung open the door and leapt onto the sidewalk, both
Glocks in his hands. He ran a few feet forward and then abruptly spun around,
racing back to the vehicle and popping the trunk latch. Then he dashed around
the rear and removed his faded Tommy Hilfiger daypack. Flinging it over a
shoulder, he sprinted towards the four-story campus building ahead, his Nikes
crunching along the endless glass shards from broken storefronts. As he ran, he
could hear the surrounding corridors between buildings begin to fill with the
sound of shuffling and shrieking.

The illuminated building ahead shone
like a lighthouse to a lone sailor. Jared’s pace increased as the sound of his
panting was drowned out by the menacing noises permeating the oppressive night
air.